Highwire Days
“Hell From The Eyes Up”
(Rise Records)
Screw 32 never impressed me. Something about the repetition of song after song always left me wishing they were better. Keep that in mind. Anyway, that was 1995, those were the days. Today Screw 32’s former vocalist, Andrew Champion, heads up this band named after a Psychedelic Furs song, Highwire Days. That’s a damn cool thing. And the sound? Well, Andrew’s vocals are relatively unchanged, borrowing heavily from early Face To Face. And the band follows his lead, recreating a sound Trever Keith and his boys have already done to death. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that except that Face To Face has the same problem Screw 32 did; hyper-repetition. The guitars are loud. The tempo is quick. The tone is heavy. There are some really nice drum parts with excellent cymbal work and the bass is fat and driving just like all your old favorites. Sounds decent, right? Well, that’s the description for each song. No variation, twelve tracks in a row, although it is only 22 minutes long. Like an exercise in sonic redundancy, this just sounds like Screw 32 part two or Face To Face junior. Oh well, at least the album design is pleasant in a Midwestern emo kind of way.
